A Conspiracy in Belgravia

by Sherry Thomas

  They’d been to the crime scene. They’d visited a constable who hadn’t realized that the drunken loiterer at the scene was the murderer himself, coming back to find a sentimental item he had accidentally dropped. (Livia hadn’t decided what it would be yet. A cameo brooch? A locket? No matter, she could settle on something later.) And now Sherlock Holmes had ordered a newspaper notice about said sentimental item, in order to lure the murderer to him.

  But would the murderer come?

  Livia yawned. She’d been up since half past four, writing. And now it was almost seven. She didn’t want breakfast, but she did want some tea.

  She went down to the breakfast parlor, poured herself a cup, and sat down with the paper. Almost immediately she spotted the new Cdaq Khuha message at the back.

  CDAQKHUHAGDHRMNSNTQXQNSGDQXTSXDVAQD

  DEARLIVIAHEISNOTOURBROTHERBUTBEWARE

  She covered her mouth with her hands. He wasn’t their brother? He wasn’t their brother!

  This was the best news she’d had in a long time.

  She ran back upstairs, fell onto her bed, and lay there panting, speechless with relief. Thank God. Everything was still wrong with the picture, but thank God her feelings were no longer incestuous.

  It was only after a solid five minutes that she sat up and frowned. Of course she would beware, but if he wasn’t their brother, then who was he?

  De Lacy, the alleged murderer of Mr. Richard Hayward, even if he hadn’t been waterlogged, would still have been sizable.

  After a good soak in the Thames, it became harder to tell whether he had been strong and burly or merely fat and soft.

  Probably somewhere in between. Not someone Inspector Treadles would want to meet in a dark alley; but if he had met such a man in such a place, he also wouldn’t have been unduly afraid.

  “Interesting scarf,” commented Sergeant MacDonald.

  The man was indifferently dressed, except for the summer scarf of white and scarlet stripes around his neck, the colors so vivid that the pattern was unmistakable even under a layer of mud.

  Inspector Treadles felt the material between his fingers. Silk, no doubt about it, lightweight yet strong. “You read the preliminary report, MacDonald. This is the scarf the pathologist said he’d been strangled with?”

  “That’s his theory, sir. Said the bruises around the neck point to strangling. But he’ll have to open the man up and check the lungs before he can be sure that drowning wasn’t the cause of death.”

  Treadles made one more circle around the slab on which the dead man lay. “Let’s speak to some witnesses.”

  Charlotte had declined Mrs. Watson’s offer to make her look splotchy and at least fifteen years older. “I’m going to be sitting four feet across from him, ma’am,” she’d told Mrs. Watson. “A face full of makeup might make him pay more attention to me, rather than less.”

  But now that she was sitting four feet across from Mr. Gillespie, she wondered whether she wouldn’t have been better off with “a face full of makeup.” He didn’t stare at her, but he had blinked rapidly a few times when they were shown into his office. Even though he seemed to be giving Miss Redmayne’s recital due attention, he kept rearranging items on his desk, as if he were his own overzealous secretary.

  “Are you listening to me, Mr. Gillespie?” Miss Redmayne asked outright once.

  The solicitor gave a pained smile. “Of course, miss. Do please go on.”

  But it would appear that Miss Redmayne’s instincts were correct and he hadn’t paid the least attention to her, because now that he was forced to, he sat with wide eyes, blinking often, frowning almost as often, even shaking his head a few times, not a motion to indicate negation, but the kind of quick rattle one gave oneself in extraordinary situations to make sure one wasn’t dreaming.

  Not exactly the sympathetic response one might have anticipated on the part of an older man faced with a pretty young woman’s tearful distress.

  At the end of Miss Redmayne’s account of many woes, he studied her closely. “This is a joke, right, Miss—ah—”

  “Miss Gibbons,” Miss Redmayne supplied helpfully.

  “Right, Miss Gibbons. Surely this is all a prank.”

  “How could you say that?” cried Miss Redmayne, with a convincing display of consternation.

  “Because you are not the first woman to come in and give me this exact story about him.”

  “What? What?!”

  Miss Redmayne’s voice rose shrilly. The next moment she slumped over into Charlotte’s lap.

  “Oh, dear. Oh, dear!” cried Charlotte with plenty of fearfulness, though she stopped short of actually wringing her hands.

  “Shall I—shall I send for a doctor?” said Mr. Gillespie, with the expression of a man who wasn’t sure whether he ought to laugh or drink heavily.

  Charlotte was of half a mind to ask the man outright whether he knew who she was, but decided to carry on with the charade. “The poor dear will be so embarrassed. Let’s see if she comes to on her own.”

  They both stared at Miss Redmayne, Charlotte tapping her on the cheeks a few times. When Miss Redmayne showed no sign of “reviving,” Charlotte decided that the former meant for her to take over the conversation.

  “I tried to warn her, Mr. Gillespie, I did. I told her that it was foolhardy trying to find a man who doesn’t want to be found. But you can’t tell young people anything, can you?”

  “No, you cannot. Not these days.”

  His expression was more under control. Had he, like her, opted to keep up the farce?

  “Was the lady who came to see you a tall, slim, beautiful brunette with dark eyes, about twenty-six, a beauty mark at the corner of her mouth?”

  “Why, yes.”

  Charlotte clutched the buttons of her bodice. “Oh, that cad! We saw him with her one time and he swore up and down it was his cousin, visiting from Stokes.”

  “I am most distressed to learn that Mr. Finch should turn out to be so faithless. But he is illegitimate, and it was a mistake on your charge’s part to hold his character in high regard.”

  Charlotte sighed exaggeratedly. “Well, she is very young. I hope this will prove to be a valuable lesson to her.”

  A knock came at the door. Mr. Gillespie’s secretary stuck in his head. “Sir, Mr. Malcolm is here and he’s in a hurry to see you.”

  Miss Redmayne, hearing this, slowly sat up. “Oh, my,” she said vaguely, “how strange I feel. What happened?”

  “I’ll tell you later, my dear.”

  “But wait,” said Miss Redmayne to Mr. Gillespie. “Do you have Mr. Finch’s last known address? I have need of it.”

  For a moment Mr. Gillespie looked conflicted.

  Miss Redmayne rose and stamped her foot. “You must. I will not leave until I have it.”

  “Yes, yes, of course. I’m all too happy to oblige.”

  But Charlotte knew that he didn’t oblige them at all. When they had left Mr. Gillespie’s office, she told Miss Redmayne that she could give the piece of paper from the solicitor to the next scrap collector they came across.

  Miss Redmayne was dismayed. “This isn’t the correct address?”

  “No,” said Charlotte. “But I saw the address in the dossier he took out, ostensibly to write it down for us.”

  “But he put his hand in front of it.”

  He had, but a fraction of a moment was enough for Charlotte, looking at the address upside down, to memorize every line.

  “That didn’t matter,” she said. “I say we did well.”

  The pub was a hard place and smelled of cheap ale and indifferent food. But it was also a good deal cleaner and sharper than it had any reason to be, in imitation of its proprietress, a flinty-looking woman who seemed to have never been pretty but was put together with the precision of a Swiss watch.

  Treadles
didn’t know how he knew, but he was certain the woman had been a prostitute at one point.

  He did not enjoy questioning prostitutes, to say the least.

  “Mrs. Bamber, the dead man washed ashore not far from the back of this pub. When bystanders were gathered around and one of your patrons declared that he had seen this man in the pub two nights ago and had spent a solid hour talking to him, you contradicted him and said the victim had never been in your establishment.”

  “I did.”

  “Are you concerned that if you told the truth, it would lead to trouble?”

  “What I told was the truth. I know the regulars who come in. I know the strangers who come in—pay more attention to them, in fact, in case they start a fight or leave me with their tab. Two nights ago a man did speak to Young Boyd for a while. But the dead man? Wasn’t him.”

  “Why should I believe you, Mrs. Bamber, given your past occupation?”

  The woman stilled, then flicked Treadles a look of contempt. “If you have no intention of believing me, best not waste my time, Inspector. There’s Young Boyd yonder. Take his account. And while you’re at it, ask him to read today’s headlines for you.”

  It defeated Treadles why she was the one scornful toward him. Nevertheless, her look made him feel . . . low, somehow. He thanked her curtly and decamped to where Young Boyd sat, nursing a pint before noon.

  “Mr. Boyd, we are interested in your account of the man you met two nights ago.”

  Young Boyd seemed to fit the description of an amiable drunk—or at least a harmless one. He offered a shaky hand to the policemen and was full of smiles and eagerness—no doubt in the hope of a free pint. Treadles reluctantly motioned for one.

  “Fine fellow he was. Big, fine fellow. Kept buying me rounds. Then he asked me, when we were good and jolly, if I could keep a secret,” said Young Boyd, the man least likely to keep a secret Treadles had ever met.

  “I told him, of course! They could torture me in the Tower of London and I won’t say a thing. That’s when he told me he was a killer by profession. That he hired out his services and that it wasn’t a bad living, but not fancy either. But something went wrong for him and he was ’bout to go on the run.

  “So I asked him if he was afraid of the police. He laughed and said only namby-pambies were afraid of the police. He was afraid of the people who hired him. They wanted the thing done nice and quiet and the police somehow caught wind of him in Hounslow. And now the people who hired him wanted to get rid of him, to make sure the police couldn’t find them.”

  “Did you ask who they were?”

  “He said they were criminals. But not pickpockets. Not even hired killers like him. They are kings of crime and hardly ever dirty their own hands. The man he killed tried to double-cross them. And they hunted him down. And this fellow, de Lacy he said his name was, he thought his own days were numbered. And gosh if he wasn’t right about that.”

  Treadles had been looking askance at Young Boyd, wondering whether he wasn’t simply making things up from what he’d read in the papers—until the name de Lacy dropped from his lips. That, he’d only just learned himself and was not public information.

  “He told you his name?”

  “And said that’s just what he was called and not his real name and he wasn’t even the first man to go by that name.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Then he left. I never thought to see him again—thought he’d manage to run away and hide somewhere safe. But this morning there he was, dead as a doornail, all bloated and ugly like.”

  Treadles tried to glean more information, but Young Boyd began to repeat himself. Treadles signaled for another pint, which only made Young Boyd embroider what he’d already told them.

  Sensing that the witness was of no further use, Treadles thanked him and rose.

  “By the way, Mr. Boyd,” said MacDonald, “would you mind reading this headline for us? You can read, I assume?”

  “Of course I can.” Young Boyd squinted at the big, bold letters and squinted some more, until he muttered and took a pair of bent specs out of his pocket. “‘The Queen heads to Balmoral.’”

  Treadles swore inwardly. “Were you wearing your glasses on the night you met this de Lacy?”

  “Course not. Never take them out except to read—and I don’t read much. But I can see well enough to find my way here—and I saw his fancy scarf nice and clear.”

  “I don’t know why I should have been so surprised that Lady Ingram didn’t tell us everything,” said Mrs. Watson, at last giving voice to the cloudburst of thoughts that had flooded her head since she’d learned of Lady Ingram’s visit to Mr. Gillespie. “Looking back, it’s beyond obvious that she would have held back everything she didn’t need to tell us. She was on an illicit mission, after all.

  “And it makes sense that she would first go to a solicitor, rather than a consulting detective. It would be only after she had run out of options that a visit with Sherlock Holmes becomes thinkable. But this, of course, means that the address from Mr. Gillespie will lead nowhere.”

  She tightened her hat ribbons with rather unnecessary force. “Anyway, please don’t listen to me blathering on about things you already know, Miss Holmes.”

  They were back in Oxfordshire. The most recent address Mr. Gillespie had for Mr. Finch had brought them to a picturesque village. Mrs. Watson, a longtime denizen of London, loved the sight of green, open country and the quintessentially English beauty of a hamlet centered around a modest stone church. She had lived in precisely such a place as an adolescent and had found it difficult to overcome the prejudice of the villagers against outsiders, especially outsiders who entertained thoughts of leaving. But it was not in her nature to think ill of all small country settlements simply because one had proved unpleasant. She much preferred imagining that most such places were as lovely in their residents as they were in their scenery, that the peace and quiet of village life coexisted with a spirit of curiosity and magnanimity.

  At the village pub she ordered a plate of sausage and mash—steak and kidney pudding for Miss Holmes. The plain but substantial dishes were washed down with the pub’s own ale, a light, refreshing brew. When the publican’s wife came to inquire whether they wanted anything more, a spirited discussion broke out on whether they ought to have summer trifle because summer was ending or the jam roly-poly in hot custard since neither of them had enjoyed one in a while.

  They settled on one serving of each and when the publican’s wife returned, Mrs. Watson was ready.

  “If you have a minute, Mrs. Glossop, may I ask you a question about a young man who might have lived on these premises for some time?”

  Mrs. Glossop’s eyes widened. “Are you interested in Mr. Myron Finch, by any chance?”

  This time, Mrs. Watson was not surprised. After all, what good would Mr. Finch’s address have been to Lady Ingram, if she hadn’t made use of it?

  “Yes, we are. We are making inquiries on behalf of a client of Mr. Sherlock Holmes’s, who is trying to locate Mr. Finch.”

  The name Sherlock Holmes didn’t have any effect on Mrs. Glossop, but she did consider the two women at the table with something between curiosity and alarm. “You ladies are private investigators?”

  “My brother is a consulting detective,” said Miss Holmes. “Mrs. Hudson and I assist him in his endeavors. At the moment his health isn’t what it used to be. Ventures that require traveling therefore fall to us.”

  “How brave you must be.”

  “We try not to take on clients who would require too much traveling,” said Mrs. Watson modestly. “But in any case, not long ago, a lady came to us worried that Mr. Finch wasn’t where he ought to be. Since we haven’t managed to locate him in London, we thought we’d try and see whether anyone from back home might have news of him.”

  Mrs. Glossop shook her head. “I’d li
ke to help, but I don’t know anything. And if anybody ought to know anything, that’d be me, wouldn’t it? After that man what came a month ago, asking about Mr. Finch, I got curious. So I asked Mr. Glossop. His uncle was publican here before him—and married Widow Finch twenty years ago.

  “She had no roots here—just her and the boy in an old cottage on Sweetbriar Lane for ten years before she married old Mr. Glossop. Folks here don’t have much to say about her—she kept to herself even after she became the publican’s wife. And they know even less about her son. He was sent off to school early. They said he played cricket at school but never played it with the village boys when he came home on holidays. He just looked after old Mr. Glossop’s horses and read books.

  “The last time anyone here saw him was more than a dozen years ago, at his mother and old Mr. Glossop’s funeral—they died within forty-eight hours of each other. A bad winter for pneumonia, that was. Mr. Glossop and I didn’t know old Mr. Glossop all that well—we didn’t even know he’d died. Quite shocked we were, when we got a letter from his lawyer telling us he’d left us the pub. Mr. Glossop felt bad that young Mr. Finch didn’t even get a share in the pub. He wrote Mr. Finch and said that he could come and stay with us anytime.”

  “Where did he write Mr. Finch?” asked Miss Holmes.

  “Oh, at his school. He was at a boys’ school near Oxford. And Mr. Finch wrote back all polite like and said thank you very much but he didn’t expect to return anytime soon. Mr. Glossop wrote again after a year or two had passed, and again Mr. Finch wrote back saying the exact same thing. And that’s the last we heard of him.”

  Miss Holmes had another question. “The second time you wrote, he was still in school?”

  “We wrote to the school’s address, but it might have been forwarded. The address he wrote back from was a different one, in Oxford proper. When the man asked about Mr. Finch, I gave him that address. The next time Mr. Glossop and I went into Oxford, we went around, since so many people have been asking about him—”